Pixel Scroll 4/17/18 A Noun, A Verb, And Pixel Scroll

(1) UP ON THE ROOFTOP. Not the sort of thing you usually find on a New York rooftop, like a pigeon coop, or Spider-Man — “The Met Rooftop’s New Installation, ‘We Come in Peace,’ Has Landed”.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Roof Garden is now officially open for the season (along with its bar!), and this year’s site-specific commission is a powerful pair of imposing sculptures by Pakistani artist Huma Bhabha. Titled We Come In Peace (a phrase lifted from the 1951 sci-fi film The Day the Earth Stood Still), the work conjures up an ominous but open-ended narrative, inviting visitors to explore their own thematic interpretations: subjugation and supplication, respect, fear, and/or adoration; social upheaval and displacement; gender, power, and “memories of place.”

Bhabha forged the two pieces in her Poughkeepsie studio from ephemera and construction materials (cork, Styrofoam, plastic) which she then cast in bronze….

(2) TOUGH JOB. Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag, in “Conventions and problematic people” at Bloggity-Blog-Blog, reviews the latest news about ConCarolinas and Worldcon and concludes:

It’s enough to make a person swear off conventions. Certainly enough to make being on a concom a dangerous and scary job. I admit I admire those members of fandom who volunteer their time for such a thankless task even more after learning about these various problems.

(3) TOUGHER JOB. Naomi Kritzer and Alex Acks share their thoughts about panel moderation in two separate threads. Jump in by clicking on these tweets:

(4) ALASDAIR STUART. A Shadow Clarke juror tells how he’s going to do it: “Compass Bearings: Alasdair Stuart’s Picks”.

I really liked the thought process Nick talked about in his Reading List piece, and how the books he’s chosen are intended to serve as a cross section of SF as it currently stands. That helped crystallize my thinking on the subject, as did dispatching my duties as a Kitschies judge this week.

That was a really fun job, and one that contained substantially more hope than a lot of people tend to see in genre fiction. Both short lists were crammed full of books that had unique voices, did unique things and drove the field, and the conversation around it, forward. It also helped me give a very clear shape to the sort of things I’m looking for in the initial Shadow Clarke read. And that shape is a compass.

I’ve got a working familiarity with a lot of these books following the Kitschies and, if I wanted to, I could focus entirely on that. But what really excites me about this list is the opportunity it presents to push outside my boundaries. In addition, given how much I often rail against SF culture’s tendency to enthusiastically face backwards on the rocket, it would be completely remiss of me to just hug some books I already know a little bit tighter.

So, that’s my critical North in this situation. My critical South is to not overlook books that deserve to be talked about. Sometimes those will come from big names. Chances are, more likely, they’ll come from newcomers.

(5) TRUTH IN DANGER. At the hands of Dangerous’ ace reporter Jon Del Arroz, John Ringo’s decision not to go to ConCarolinas now becomes a “ban,” and people’s threats not to show up are transmogrified to threats of violence — “Author John Ringo Responds to SJW Assault That Led to Sci-Fi Convention Ban” [Internet Archive link.]

ConCarolinas initially didn’t respond to the nasty trolling and threats of boycotts, but after deliberating over the weekend, they sent Ringo an email disinviting him from the convention because, as the convention chair said on Twitter, “the con could not guarantee Ringo wouldn’t be walking into a hostile environment. John wanted to have fun. A reasonable request. The con could not guarantee that he wouldn’t be subject to people being ugly to him.”

Ringo recalls the interchange with the convention to be a bit more serious, stating he was asked not to attend because, “we were going to have to hire full time security guards and maybe off-duty police during peak hours.”

If the crowd is prone to be as violent as he suggests, and it has gotten increasingly worse over these last few years, why won’t the conventions do something to protect their conservative guests?

(6) LLEGAL ADVICE. This defendant in JDA’s lawsuit lives overseas.

(7) ON THE AIR. NPR reports that in Ann Arbor a bookstore’s public typewriter is the town conscience. And repository of fart jokes. “‘Notes From A Public Typewriter’ Muse On Everything From Cats To Commencement”

When it’s closing time at Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, co-owner Michael Gustafson runs through a checklist that, for the most part, is pretty routine. First, make sure all the customers have gone, lock the doors and take out the garbage and the recycling. Shelve any stray books, adjust the tables, turn off the music.

Then, after closing out the registers, Gustafson descends one last time to the store’s lower level, the part of the bookstore stuffed with volumes on cooking and gardening, travel and history. And he sits down at an old typewriter to read the notes the day’s customers have left behind.

On busy days, there are dozens and dozens of them….

(8) TRASH MASTERS. Here’s the next job robots are taking over, and it probably won’t be much of a struggle: “How robots are reshaping one of the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs”.

Sorting trash is a dirty, dull, and dangerous job. Recycling workers are more than twice as likely as other workers to be injured on the job, and stubbornly high fatality rates make refuse and recyclable material collection one of the nation’s most dangerous occupations.

But with the rise of artificial intelligence, sophisticated trash-sorting robots are now turning up at recycling plants across the nation. Guided by cameras and computer systems trained to recognize specific objects, the robots’ arms glide over moving conveyor belts until they reach their target. Suction cups or oversized tongs attached to the arms snag cans, glass, plastic containers, and other recyclable items out of the rubbish and flick them into nearby bins.

(9) CANON FIRE. Ethan Alter, in the Yahoo! Entertainment story “How ‘Solo’ rolls dice on a key piece of ‘Star Wars’ history”, says that in Solo the game of sabacc that Han Solo used to win the Millennium Falcon has been clarified. A.C. Crispin in her novel Rebel Dawn declared sabacc to be a dice game, but her novel has been ruled non-canonical and the official tie-in version of sabacc is a combination of dice and cards.

That would be the moment that flyboy Han Solo (played by Alden Ehrenreich) wins his beloved “bucket of bolts,” the Millennium Falcon, away from its previous owner, Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover). Their face-off occurs during a climactic round of sabacc, the card game enjoyed by galactic citizens residing on every planet from Apatros to Yavin. And based on this Solo teaser, Han is quite clearly the underdog, while Lando is the top dog; in a hilarious moment, Solo reveals his cards to his sidekick, Chewbacca, and the Wookiee lets out a classic moan that doesn’t require any translation. (But allow us to translate anyway: “You’re screwed.”)

The sabacc sequence won’t just be Solo‘s answer to Casino Royale‘s classic poker game, though. It’s also going to firmly establish how the Millennium Falcon changed hands, a story that has gone through several permutations over the decades. It all started in The Empire Strikes Back, when Han (played by Harrison Ford) showed up in Cloud City and Lando (Billy Dee Williams) ribbed him over the Falcon’s poor shape. “What have you done to my ship?” he asked, to which Han protested: “Your ship? Hey, remember, you lost her to me fair and square.”

(10) BIG BLABBERS. Looper will see to it that the “Untold Truth of the Hulk” is untold no longer!!

The Incredible Hulk is one of Marvel’s oldest and most recognizable icons. Created by comics legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and first appearing in 1962’s Incredible Hulk #1, the Green Goliath spawned hundreds of comics, two live-action movies, a popular live-action TV show, and multiple animated series, films, and video games. And most importantly — big foam hands that make smashy sounds when you hit things with them. With so much Hulk over so much media, it’s almost impossible for even the most hardcore fans to keep up with all of the stories. Here’s the untold truth of the Incredible Hulk…

 

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Mark Hepworth, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories, Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip W.]

64 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 4/17/18 A Noun, A Verb, And Pixel Scroll

  1. (5) TRUTH IN DANGER.

    That’s a nice usage of quotes in that article, but you missed the quotes around “ace”.

  2. Rugby scum, surely? With singing, of course!
    BTW, I’ve been to a rugby game where Wales was the home team, but not played in Wales!

  3. Errolwi: Rugby scum, surely?

    Well, I’m no fan of rugby, but isn’t that a little harsh? 😉

  4. We therefore feel constrained to impose on you the maximum sentence: five years of mutton and leek stew.

  5. @Camestros: I think I might understand how trial by either dragons or choral music work separately, but how do you have a trial by both? A trial by two consecutive parts, or some kind of weird combination?

  6. 3) I got put on a panel as moderator a few years ago. It was definitely “sink or swim” because I don’t have a lot of experience with panels period, let alone moderating one! I went in with the mantra that I had 3 jobs: to make sure everyone in the panel got their say, to take questions from the audience, and to wind things up on time. I will say that my experience with wrangling chaos filks came in handy. 🙂

    I was lucky; the closest thing to a problem panelist I had was a guy who kept talking about “getting the panel back on track” when nobody else thought it was going off track. By this I think he meant that taking audience questions was a waste of his valuable speaking time. But I found that acting confident was a key value; most of the people in the room are happy to follow the mod’s lead, but you have to provide the lead for them to follow. And one of the other panelists congratulated me afterwards on my moderation, so I think I succeeded.

  7. That’s actually a deleted scene from Goblet of Fire.

    The one where they draw a Bach cantata out of one bag and 4 dragons out of another, and then need to arrange the cantata for the dragons?

  8. You have to sing at the dragons obviously – and if you do it right the dragons will be so overcome by your rousing rendition of Men of Harlech they’ll not burn you to a crisp.

    [I’ll confess to not having seen a rugby union game in either Wales or its sunnier sequel New South Wales but my parents did own a Max Boyce record]

  9. I have seen rugby games in Wales and at Llanelli there was a lot of singing and also saucepans decorating the stadium, presumably to protect against dragons.

    There is a more prosaic explanation about the saucepans involving the traditional song Sospan Fachs and representing local industry but I’ll go with dragons.

  10. Alex and Naomi are both excellent panelists (I’ve been on panels with both of them), so they definitely have strong real world experience to teach from.

    5) I note that Mr. Del Arroz’s byline in the magazine article continuies his highly questionable claim that he is the leading Hispanic voice in Science Fiction.

  11. Just waiting for a disruptive startup to combine 3) and 8) and build a robot that throws [out] / [foam balls at] misbehaving panelists. (Hmm… story idea? Nah…)

    @Camestros I assume that trial by choral is a sing-off, and trial by dragon involves each side bringing a dragon and let them fight it out (i.e. a singe-off), Pokemon-style.
    When combined, I assume the choir will direct the tactic of their dragon, and by their singing lead and inspire their dragon to prevail. Is that correct? I’d pay good money to see that.

  12. Two dragons conduct the singing of their choirs, while attempting to distract each other with flames (and with recitation of Welsh poetry). Combat is held in a quarry so that the Doctor can officiate.

    Two Choirs Enter, one Super-Choir Leaves.

  13. There is a more prosaic explanation about the saucepans involving the traditional song Sospan Fachs

    Must be old if it’s a song about a fax.

    Proceedings are disrupted by Blake, Avon, et al. rushing into the quarry, pursued by Servalan.

    The Tomorrow People jaunt in, realise they can’t match Blake and the Doctor’s production values, and jaunt out.

  14. Sapphire and Steel appear to sort out the mess, realize they can’t even match the Tomorrow People’s production values, and disappear as mysteriously as they came.

    (An unexpected trip to hospital derailed my Hugo finalist reviewing yesterday, but I am back now and normal service has been resumed.)

  15. It’s tougher than that. It can’t be so bad they want to eat you, obviously, but dragons applaud by snorting fire, so you’re walking a pretty fine line.

    (8) When I was a drone at University of Houston, the geniuses in charge decided that the school owned every aluminum can on campus, and decreed that the custodians had to poke through all the trash bags to extract and reclaim these valuable assets. I wrote a scathing letter to the school paper about the nasty, sticky burden this added to an already hard-enough job (and questioning their ownership of the can I may have just paid for from a vending machine). They rescinded the policy pretty quickly, no doubt due entirely to my own sterling effort, and not to any mountain of complains they may well have received.

  16. @6: Morgan is not only not-in-the-US; the last I heard, she was banned from entering, based on a C&E screwup over employment. (This was some years ago; somebody’s rectocranial inversion may have healed by now, but I’m not holding my breath.) I expect JdA could find a UK jackass willing to serve papers, but first he’d have to get papers to serve — which might be more difficult.

  17. 3. Naomi, I read the “after action” report you linked to – or as much as I could stomach.

    You know, not once in…ummmm…44 years have I checked the trending political climate of a state prior to going to a convention there.

    Not once have I looked at a list of fellow panelists – whether moderating or simply appearing – and dug into their bios to see what their supposed political affiliations might be

    and not once have I ever seen anyone at a convention (including me) spout mundane political concerns in the middle of the lobby to gage what kind of crowd was attending.

    I’ve gotten along just fine with plenty of fans and pros who later turned out to have different politics than myself – probably because none of us were interested in talking politics when we had so many more interesting things to discuss.

    And despite discovering differences of opinion with those same people, not once have I ever thought to myself – there MUST be a conspiracy….

    There is something seriously wrong when you live, work and are successful in the USA and view the world through such a distorted lens.

  18. Some rather nice news from Marie Brennan

    I just got word that the ENTIRETY of the Memoirs of #LadyTrent will be included in the #HugoAwards voter packet. So if you register for @worldcon2018, you’ll get the whole series in ebook, along with lots of other great fiction, award voting rights, and more!

    Probably not a surprise as they’re published by TOR and they usually provide full books, but it’s nice that anyone converted to how fun it is will be able to read the whole thing.

  19. Paul Weimer:

    5) I note that Mr. Del Arroz’s byline in the magazine article continuies his highly questionable claim that he is the leading Hispanic voice in Science Fiction.

    Something that just occurred to me: Does this include Hispanic science fiction writers in Latin America? I mean, that’s a pretty large group.

  20. @Lisa Goldstein: I don’t think it counts anywhere except in his own mind. Certainly not in the Americas or Europe. And I tend to doubt he’s leading in Africa or Asia either. Maybe Antartica? 😀

  21. Lisa Goldstein on April 18, 2018 at 10:31 am said:

    Something that just occurred to me: Does this include Hispanic science fiction writers in Latin America? I mean, that’s a pretty large group.

    All the more impressive.

  22. Uh ac crispin, who wasn’t the first to describe sabacc in the old EU, showed It as a game of cards, not dice…..I’m so confused

  23. Kip W on April 18, 2018 at 6:41 am said:

    …dragons applaud by snorting fire, so you’re walking a pretty fine line.

    Are they inhaling or exhaling? (If inhaling, you probably don’t want to be standing in the, ahem, line of fire.)

  24. Marie Brennan via @Mark

    I just got word that the ENTIRETY of the Memoirs of #LadyTrent will be included in the #HugoAwards voter packet.

    That should be enough Dragons for a Welsh Supreme Court trial!
    Such generosity should garner Tor a Dragon Award for best publisher.

  25. So… um… I gotta disagree with Crispin here, as someone who is doing a big project going through the old Star Wars Expanded Universe (now known as the “Legends” continuity). In the Lando Calrissian Adventures (which predates Zahn), Sabacc is just a card game.

    In Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy (which kicked off the revived Expanded universe), it’s also just a card game, but one where we see more of the mechanics – with the game being a mix of Blackjack, Texas Hold’em and Mahjong – where the players form hands of cards through hands that are dealt and a communal pool of cards in the middle of the table. Those cards in the middle value over the course of the game (at random), while the cards in your hand are locked. The goal is to score the best possible hand rated without going over a certain point value (ala Blackjack), using the cards on the table and in their hand (Texas Hold-Em), exchanging cards from the table with the cards in their hand to form a better hand, with the catch that doing such an exchange gives opponents information about what cards are in their hand (Mahjong).

    The description of Mahjong that Crispin gives (admitting that I haven’t gotten to her book next – though I’m right about there), doesn’t match that at all.

  26. Daniel P Dern, the inward variety is properly called “snorking,” Look in your heart and see that this is true.

  27. JJ: my excuse is that my phone is fairly new, and the keyboard is not trained yet! It’s still learning aircraft names and other vital words. 🙂

  28. Kip W on April 18, 2018 at 1:44 pm said:

    Daniel P Dern, the inward variety [of ‘snorting’] is properly called “snorking,” Look in your heart and see that this is true.

    I did, and the query redirected to DuckDuckGo, which gave helpful results like:

    o Føler du deg lite uthvilt og uopplagt når du våkner om morgenen? Skyldes det at du eller din partner snorker? Snorking er et utbredt problem, spesielt blant menn, og skyldes at det er er trangt i bakre del av svelget.
    o Snorking er et velkjent fenomen, spesielt hos godt voksne menn. Overvekt og røyking kan forverre snorkingen, og det er flere ting du selv kan gjøre for å bedre nattesøvnen.
    o Snorking påvirker svært mange mennesker.

    (I’m ignoring the results that assumed I’d meant “snorkling,” as I think that’s a bit tricky for most dragons, respiratorially, even ignoring all other possible difficulties.

  29. While I’m sure folks are aware, RIP to Barbara Bush who pushed literacy programs as first lady.

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